Assembling scholarship on the subject of nationalism from around the world, this Research Handbook brings to the attention of the reader research showcasing the unprecedented expansion of the scholarly field in general and offers a diversity of perspectives on the topic. It highlights the disarray in Western social sciences and the rise in the relative importance of previously independent scholarly traditions of China and post-Soviet societies. Nationalism is the field of study where the mutual relevance of these traditions is both most clearly evident and particularly consequential. Chapters explore specific cases (some of them previously underexplored) across a range of topics, including: the construction of a national identity, the institutionalization of nationalism, democracy and self-determination, the roles of class, ethnicity, religion and race in nationalism, and the connection between nationalism and the economy. Offering a comparative perspective on nationalism across different regions and civilizations, this Handbook also allows the reader to compare and evaluate different approaches across the social sciences, re-examining their utility. Political science, sociology and international relations scholars will find this to be an essential read in exploring the wide-ranging differences in nationalism across different countries, and its effects both historically and in modern times. This will also be a valuable book for policy-makers looking for different perspectives on the topic.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. This original Introduction presents nationalism as the most important social force shaping the ways modern men and women live their lives. It explains the formative influence of nationalism in the public spheres of politics and the economy, as well as in the most private ones of emotional life and mental illness. Along the way, it illuminates widely used but rarely clarified concepts, such as social institution, revolution, ideology, and totalitarianism, and introduces new ones, among them dignity capital and nationalism as the double-helix of modern politics. Basing its conclusions on over twenty-five years of original comparative historical research, this book bears the characteristic Liah Greenfeld imprint: fact-based discussion, logical rigor, unexpected connections, and an exceptionally wide range of issues weaved together to explain the way we live now. Key features include: - Discusses nationalism as an empirical phenomenon, not an object of speculation - Distils findings of over twenty-five years of original comparative historical research - Introduces original concepts of dignity capital and nationalism as the double-helix of modern politics.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. This original Introduction presents nationalism as the most important social force shaping the ways modern men and women live their lives. It explains the formative influence of nationalism in the public spheres of politics and the economy, as well as in the most private ones of emotional life and mental illness. Along the way, it illuminates widely used but rarely clarified concepts, such as social institution, revolution, ideology, and totalitarianism, and introduces new ones, among them dignity capital and nationalism as the double-helix of modern politics. Basing its conclusions on over twenty-five years of original comparative historical research, this book bears the characteristic Liah Greenfeld imprint: fact-based discussion, logical rigor, unexpected connections, and an exceptionally wide range of issues weaved together to explain the way we live now. Key features include: - Discusses nationalism as an empirical phenomenon, not an object of speculation - Distils findings of over twenty-five years of original comparative historical research - Introduces original concepts of dignity capital and nationalism as the double-helix of modern politics.

Joseph Ben-David died twenty-five years ago, in January 1986. An eminent sociologist of science, and a co-founder of this sub-discipline, he was only sixty-five years old. Few social scientists are remembered after they die and can no longer parlay their influence into the goods of this world for colleagues and acquaintances. This was not Ben-David's fate. His work continues to be taught and referred to by scholars spread far and wide (in terms of both countries and disciplines). His students never forgot him, his books were republished, and his essays appeared in new collections.Ben-David's legacy includes ideas and ideals. Its central tenet is the autonomy of science, its right - and duty - to be value-free. Scholarship oriented to any goal other than the accumulation of objective knowledge about empirical reality, for him, was science no longer and did not have its authority. In this light, the life of scholarship was one of moral dedication, with nothing less than the fate of liberal democratic society depending on it. And for science to thrive, the university, its home, had to be the embodiment of the cardinal virtue of this society: the virtue of civility.In the spirit of Ben-David, believing that scholarly debate advances common good, and rational discourse wins whichever way arguments in it are settled, this festschrift debates such core issues as the nature of science, its changing definition and position in Western society, the forms of organization optimal for scientific creativity, and the ability of the research university to foster scientific growth, while also performing its educational role.

Joseph Ben-David died twenty-five years ago, in January 1986. An eminent sociologist of science, and a co-founder of this sub-discipline, he was only sixty-five years old. Few social scientists are remembered after they die and can no longer parlay their influence into the goods of this world for colleagues and acquaintances. This was not Ben-David's fate. His work continues to be taught and referred to by scholars spread far and wide (in terms of both countries and disciplines). His students never forgot him, his books were republished, and his essays appeared in new collections. Ben-David's legacy includes ideas and ideals. Its central tenet is the autonomy of science, its right--and duty--to be value-free. Scholarship oriented to any goal other than the accumulation of objective knowledge about empirical reality, for him, was science no longer and did not have its authority. In this light, the life of scholarship was one of moral dedication, with nothing less than the fate of liberal democratic society depending on it. And for science to thrive, the university, its home, had to be the embodiment of the cardinal virtue of this society: the virtue of civility. In the spirit of Ben-David, believing that scholarly debate advances common good, and rational discourse wins whichever way arguments in it are settled, this festschrift debates such core issues as the nature of science, its changing definition and position in Western society, the forms of organization optimal for scientific creativity, and the ability of the research university to foster scientific growth, while also performing its educational role.

Using a wealth of data collected in Israel, this study depicts a complete system in which art is created and evaluated - the scale of Israeli society allowing for a comprehensive and detailed description of all the agents involved in the production and consumption of modern art. The author analyses the patterns of social relations and behaviour created around two art worlds - the world of abstract avant-garde art and the world of traditional figurative painting. She argues that the two worlds differ radically both in terms of the factors that affect the formation of taste, the process of evaluation and the patterns of success in them and in the ways in which these factors exert their influence.

Tracing the origins and reemergence of a phenomenon once thought vanquished by the modern, globalized world. "We need a nation," declared a certain Phillippe Grouvelle in 1879, "and the Nation will be born." from Nationalism: A Short History Nationalism, once the scourge of world politics, is back. And for many today, Grouvelle's simple declaration is all that is needed to will a nation into being. But as historian Liah Greenfeld shows in her new book, a sense of nation, of nationalism, is the slow distillation of ideas and beliefs, and the struggles over them, not the product of a pronouncement. Greenfeld takes the reader on an intellectual journey through the origins of the word "nationalism" and how it has changed over the centuries. From its emergence in sixteenth century England, nationalism has affected nearly every significant development in world affairs over succeeding centuries, including the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth centuries and the authoritarian communism and fascism of the twentieth century. Now it has arrived as a mass phenomenon in China as well as gaining new life in the United States and much of Europe in the guise of populism. Written by an authority on the subject, Nationalism: A Short History stresses the dichotomy of how nationalism has been institutionalized in various places. On the one hand, nationalism has contributed to the concepts of liberal democracy, human rights, and individual self-determination. But nationalism also has been used by authoritarian and racist regimes to negate the individual as an autonomous agent. That tension is all too apparent today.

Using a wealth of data collected in Israel, this study depicts a complete system in which art is created and evaluated - the scale of Israeli society allowing for a comprehensive and detailed description of all the agents involved in the production and consumption of modern art. The author analyses the patterns of social relations and behaviour created around two art worlds - the world of abstract avant-garde art and the world of traditional figurative painting. She argues that the two worlds differ radically both in terms of the factors that affect the formation of taste, the process of evaluation and the patterns of success in them and in the ways in which these factors exert their influence.

It's the American dream-unfettered freedom to follow our ambitions, to forge our identities, to become self-made. But what if our culture of limitless self-fulfillment is actually making millions desperately ill? One of our leading interpreters of modernity and nationalism, Liah Greenfeld argues that we have overlooked the connection between egalitarian society and mental illness. Intellectually fearless, encompassing philosophy, psychology, and history, Mind, Modernity, Madness challenges the most cherished assumptions about the blessings of living in a land of the free. Modern nationalism, says Greenfeld, rests on bedrock principles of popular sovereignty, equality, and secularism. Citizens of the twenty-first century enjoy unprecedented freedom to become the authors of their personal destinies. Empowering as this is, it also places them under enormous psychic strain. They must constantly appraise their identities, manage their desires, and calibrate their place within society. For vulnerable individuals, this pressure is too much. Training her analytic eye on extensive case histories in manic depression and schizophrenia, Greenfeld contends that these illnesses are dysfunctions of selfhood caused by society's overburdening demands for self-realization. In her rigorous diagnosis, madness is a culturally constituted malady. The culminating volume of Greenfeld's nationalism trilogy, Mind, Modernity, Madness is a tour de force in the classic tradition of Emile Durkheim-and a bold foray into uncharted territory. Often counter-intuitive, always illuminating, Mind, Modernity, Madness presents a many-sided view of humanity, one that enriches our deepest understanding of who we are and what we aspire to be.

Organised as an experiment testing the hypothesis that behind the hottest political issues of the quarter-century after the Cold War lies globalisation of national consciousness, this collection of essays unites authors from the four corners of the world. They focus on democratisation and its failure in Russia, transformations of identity in Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, North and South America, and South-East Asia, the rise of militant and political Islam, and the eruption of China onto the world stage. The volume makes the argument that globalisation we are witnessing is, for the most part, the globalisation of competitive and antagonistic nationalism, which spreads to areas where it was not known earlier and into the sphere of religion, ostensibly indifferent to it. Collectively, these essays prove that nationalism remains the organising principle of politics inside nations as well as at transnational and international levels.

Liah Greenfeld's books on nationalism instigated a major paradigm shift in modern sociology, and almost instantly made her one of the world's leading authorities on the subject. With wide-ranging implications across the breadth of the humanities, she is renowned for arguing that nationalism is the main cultural foundation of modern society and its economy. Examining her thoughts not only on nationalism, but also literature, philosophy, psychology and much beside, "Nationalism and the Mind" is the only published collection of Greenfeld's essays. Uniting many disparate disciplines into a coherent perspective in philosophical anthropology, the essays provide a comprehensive theory of human nature that will influence social science for years to come. With an insightful introduction by one of her former students, it provides a fascinating resource for anyone wishing to acquaint themselves with one of the most original thinkers of the current era.

Organised as an experiment testing the hypothesis that behind the hottest political issues of the quarter-century after the Cold War lies globalisation of national consciousness, this collection of essays unites authors from the four corners of the world. They focus on democratisation and its failure in Russia, transformations of identity in Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, North and South America, and South-East Asia, the rise of militant and political Islam, and the eruption of China onto the world stage. The volume makes the argument that globalisation we are witnessing is, for the most part, the globalisation of competitive and antagonistic nationalism, which spreads to areas where it was not known earlier and into the sphere of religion, ostensibly indifferent to it. Collectively, these essays prove that nationalism remains the organising principle of politics inside nations as well as at transnational and international levels.

Nationalism is a movement and a state of mind that brings together national identity, consciousness, and collectivities. It accomplished the great transformation from the old order to modernity; it placed imagination above production, distribution, and exchange; and it altered the nature of power over people and territories that shapes and directs the social and political world. A five-country study that spans five hundred years, this historically oriented work in sociology bids well to replace all previous works on the subject. The theme, simple yet complex, suggests that England was the front-runner, with its earliest sense of self-conscious nationalism and its pragmatic ways; it utilized existing institutions while transforming itself. The Americans followed, with no formed institutions to impede them. France, Germany, and Russia took the same, now marked, path, modifying nationalism in the process. Nationalism is based on empirical data in four languages - legal documents; period dictionaries; memoirs; correspondence; literary works; theological, political, and philosophical writings; biographies; statistics; and histories. Nowhere else is the complex interaction of structural, cultural, and psychological factors so thoroughly explained. Nowhere else are concepts like identity, anomie, and elites brought so refreshingly to life.

There are several concepts within the social sciences that refer to the fundamental realities on which the various disciplines focus their attention. The concept of the center, as defined by Edward Shils, has such a status in sociology, for it deals with and attempts to provide an answer to the central question of the discipline--the question of the constitution of society. Center is a commonly used term with a variety of meanings. According to editors Liah Greenfeld and Michel Martin, center carries a twofold meaning when used as a concept. In its first sense, it is a synonym for central value system, referring to irreducible values and beliefs that establish the identity of individuals and bind them into a common universe. In its second sense, center refers to central institutional system, the authoritative institutions and persons who often express or embody the central value system. Both meanings imply a corresponding idea of periphery, referring both to the elements of society that need to be integrated and to institutions and persons who lack authority. The original essays compiled in this volume examine and apply the concept of the center in different contexts. The contributors come from a broad range of disciplines--classics, religion, philosophy, history, literary criticism, anthropology, political science, and sociology--which serves to underscore the far-reaching significance of the Shilsean theory of society. The interrelated subsets of the center-periphery theme addressed here include: symbolic systems, intellectuals, the expansion of the center into the periphery, parallel concepts in the work of other scholars besides Shils, and the paths of research inspired by these concepts. The volume features an introspective essay by Shils himself, in which he reexamines his central ideas in the light of new experiences and the ideas of others, some of them contained in this volume. By drawing together such diverse scholars around a unified idea, this collection achieves a cohesion that makes it an exciting contribution to the comparative analysis of social and cultural systems. A collective effort in social theory, Center: Ideas and Institutions is a testimony to the breadth and complexity of one of man's ideas.

"The Spirit of Capitalism" answers a fundamental question of economics, a question neither economists nor economic historians have been able to answer: what are the reasons (rather than just the conditions) for sustained economic growth? Taking her title from Max Weber's famous study on the same subject, Liah Greenfeld focuses on the problem of motivation behind the epochal change in behavior, which from the sixteenth century on has reoriented one economy after another from subsistence to profit, transforming the nature of economic activity. A detailed analysis of the development of economic consciousness in England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States allows her to argue that the motivation, or "spirit," behind the modern, growth-oriented economy was not the liberation of the "rational economic actor," but rather nationalism. Nationalism committed masses of people to an endless race for national prestige and thus brought into being the phenomenon of economic competitiveness.

Nowhere has economic activity been further removed from the rational calculation of costs than in the United States, where the economy has come to be perceived as the end-all of political life and the determinant of all social progress. American "economic civilization" spurs the nation on to ever-greater economic achievement. But it turns Americans into workaholics, unsure of the purpose of their pursuits, and leads American statesmen to exaggerate the weight of economic concerns in foreign policy, often to the detriment of American political influence and the confusion of the rest of the world.